Artificial Intelligence and Asset Pricing 2026 Fall Semester

Fall 2026, Monday 9:10 am to 12:00 pm, Classroom: To be announced
Instructors: Ren-Raw Chen and Chih-Yuan Yang

Course Information

The objective of this course is to use AI/ML to evaluate complex financial (often derivatives) contracts.  To do that, we not only need to be able to use on-the-shelf libraries, but also need to understand the underlying math and algorithms.  In other words, we will “open the black box” of every method we use in this class.  Derivations as well as good skills in Python or R are required for this course.

Prerequisites

Programming language (Python or R) and basic knowledge of probability and statistics. Linear algebra and calculus are also helpful.

Teaching Assistant and Office Hours

To be announced

Syllabus

Week	Date	Lecturer	Topic	Slides	Video Recording	Note
1	9/7	Chen
2	9/14	Chen
3	9/21	Chen
4	9/28		Holiday, no course			Teacher’s day
5	10/5	Chen
6	10/12	Chen
7	10/19	Chen
8	10/26		Observed holiday, no course			Taiwan Retrocession Day
9	11/2	Yang	Regularization
10	11/9	Yang	Classification, Decision tree, Filtering
11	11/16	Yang	Neural Networks
12	11/23		Observed holiday, no course			CGU Sports Day
13	11/30	Yang	Natural Language Processing
14	12/7	Yang	Reinforcement learning
15	12/14	Yang	GPU Computing
16	12/21		Final exam

Textbook

No. We use our own lecture notes and slides. However, the following books are good references for this course.

References

Machine Learning in Business: An Introduction to the World of Data Science by by John C. Hull, Jacky Chen, Zissis Poulos, Jun Yuan (later edition)

Grading

Your final grade will be made up from

• 70% Homework assignments, including 7 homework assignments (10% each).
• 30% final exam
• late policy
  Ten points will be deducted each day a submission is late. However, you have three penalty-free “waive days” free the entire course. Specifically, the first 24 hours after the due date counts as one day, up to 48 hours as two days, and up to 72 hours as three days. Once you run out of the three “waive days”, I will begin deducting points from your score.

Contact Info and Office Hour

Ren-Raw Chen: rchen@fordham.edu
Office hour: To be announced

Chih-Yuan Yang: cyyang@cgu.edu.tw
Office hour: Tue 10:30~11:30 Management Building Room 1416